Liveblogging, whatever, the new cat

OK I don't know exactly what liveblogging is but it seems like a good idea given the alternative. But whatever, I'm sitting here fooling around with Leopard, the new version of Mac OS -X (but I still don't get it with the cat thing, Steve) released today. It is, like, totally. Took about an hour and a half to install - I just did an upgrade, not a nuke-all-and-rebuild-from-scratch job, because I'd just done that a couple of months ago and my system was pretty clean. That's an hour and a half of fooling around with, I don't know, "life" or something, because the whole install requires about five clicks and after that it does itself. Tres cool.

The result seems, right up front, noticeably snappier than the old OS, even though there's a lot more going on as we speak. Lots of nifty to explore, beginning with the two enormous improvements (IMHO), Time Machine and Spaces. Time Machine is the one-click wonder of a backup system that sure looks bulletproof - makes hourly, then daily, then monthly incremental backups and keeps them in an easy-to-navigate and snap-to-restore form. Spaces is the dandy virtual desktop array that's so easy to work with (and I've played around with virtual desktops before) I'm already beginning to wonder how I managed to survive without it.

And there's a ton of other stuff to explore, not even counting all the Unixy goodness underneath. So I'll be at this for a while. Let's hear it for three-day weekends, huh?

Later: Weekly. Not monthly. Sorry. Time Machine, I mean. Hourly, daily, and weekly. When it makes the daily it deletes the hourlies included in that day. When it makes the weekly it deletes the included dailies. It saves the dailies forever, or until the external disk fills up, at which time it deletes the oldest to make room for more new (which means you're screwed if it takes you more than a few months to notice your hard drive's crashed).